Three verbs for taking a Palestinian houseOne dispatch, three verbs for taking a house · 1949 to 1952
1949 to 1952
Three verbs for taking a Palestinian house
In the summer of 1950 the Associated Press moved one paragraph out of Tel Aviv about the Israeli custodian of abandoned property. Three papers in this archive ran it. The copy is identical down to the figures. The headlines choose three different verbs for what happened.
“Immigrants Use Arab Properties.”
CP-1950-003“Jewish Immigrants Get Former Arab Property.”
CP-1950-004“Immigrants Taking Over Arab Property.”
CP-1950-005A year earlier the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle had described the same machinery from the inside, without a headline verb to choose: land, houses and equipment of all kinds from this source are now being disposed of systematically and legally. The army has priority on all such transactions
. And, on the economics of it: the cultivation of small orchards by a few hired hands ceased to be an economic proposition as soon as Arab cheap labor was eliminated
.
The archive holds the other direction too. In January 1950 an Associated Press photograph ran in Oklahoma under the line Arab families are reunited in Acre following repatriation of Arabs, both Christian and Moslem, who fled Palestine during the fighting.
The news agency expected more of it.
Two years after that, in St. Louis, the Arab position at the United Nations was reported as a single sentence: the Arabs would accept any form of negotiations in the Palestine dispute if Israel respected UN resolutions calling for the repatriation of Arab refugees
.